Our work assesses the effectiveness of China Scholarship Council (CSC) programs through the research performance of CSC recipients and compares it to that of their home and host countries’ counterparts. We contextualized CSC awardees’ performance benchmarking against their home and host country counterparts by using the normalized mean citation score (MNCS) and the proportion of highly cited papers (PP(top 10%)) and the proportion of open access papers (PP(OA)). Our work reveals that CSC-funded papers overall consistently demonstrate superior scientific research and open access performance compared to Chinese researchers of the same period. Additionally, within Physical Sciences and Engineering and Mathematics Computer Science, CSC awardees exceed their hosting countries with high MNCS and PP (top 10%), but in some countries CSC awardees (e.g., the US, Canada, Australia, et al.) have lower open access rates. Conversely, in Biomedical and Health Sciences, CSC awardees show inferior performance but a higher open access percentage compared to their counterparts.